Modern computer systems frequently interact with remote systems and applications, sending requests to these remote systems and waiting for responses. During the time between when a request is made to a remote system and a response is received, such systems may not be able to perform any other work, and may remain idle while still consuming resources such as memory, central processing unit and other such resources. In computer systems involving virtualized computing environments, where a plurality of guest machines may share such computer resources, expending resources on idle machines may potentially cause resource shortages as those resources may not be available to other guest virtual machines. Such resource shortages may lead to resource contention and may lead to system slowdowns, system delays and/or system outages which may, in turn, adversely affect overall system performance. In systems where a host system may support multiple guest virtual machines, the ability of a system to reclaim resources from idle machines and redistribute those resources to active machines may become important to maintaining system performance.